Lost in the Andes!
| "Lost in the Andes!" | |
|---|---|
Lost in the Andes! comic book cover
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| Story code | W OS 223-02 |
| Story | Carl Barks |
| Ink | Carl Barks |
| Date | October 21, 1948 |
| Hero | Donald Duck |
| Pages | 32 |
| Layout | 4 rows per page |
| Appearances | Donald Duck Huey, Dewey and Louie |
| First publication |
Four Color Comics #223 April 1949 |
"Lost in the Andes!" is a Donald Duck story written by Carl Barks in April 1949. Donald and his nephews go to South America to find the mythical chickens that lay square eggs (actually, they are cubic eggs).
The story features Donald and his nephews Huey, Dewey and Louie as members of a museum sponsored expedition searching for the source of a number of square "artifacts" held in the Duckburg museum, recently revealed to be square eggs when Donald drops one and it cracks open. There is a rising interest, both scientific and financial, to find the source of these eggs and the chicken that gave birth to them. The only thing known about them though is that they came from somewhere in the Andes.
During the journey to South America, the nephews use the square eggs to make an omelette. This causes the members of the expedition to come down with food poisoning. By the time their boat reaches Peru, the only ones that have recovered enough to continue the expedition are the youngest in the group and the lowest in hierarchy — Donald and his nephews.
Their search for the square eggs in the Andes seems hopeless, as the local population sees them either as insane or as suckers to be fooled into buying artificial eggs. Finally they meet a very old man who tells them of how his father once came into possession of square stones similar to their own. The father had found them on the body of an American explorer who had emerged from a neighboring valley which is covered in perpetual mist. The explorer, who had wandered the valley to the point of exhaustion, died soon afterwards. The old man's father later sold some of the "stones" in a local village and these ended up as the square eggs in the museum.
The Ducks follow the dead man's path into the mists and after days of effort they find a populated valley in the Mountains, hidden by the mists. The inhabitants are entirely cubical with square heads and noses. They speak with an old Southern American accent taught to them by their previous visitor, the dead man, Professor Rhutt Betlah (a wordplay on Rhett Butler) from Birmingham, Alabama, who had discovered their valley during the late 19th century.
During their stay in the valley, which the professor has named "Plain Awful", Huey, Dewey and Louie blow some bubble gum bubbles, which is against the law in Plain Awful: It's forbidden to produce any round objects in the valley. The only way to get out of the valley and avoid capital punishment is for Huey, Dewey and Louie to produce square bubbles. They manage to do that by teaching the square chickens to chew gum and blow bubbles, and then hiding them under their shirts and pretending they make the bubbles themselves.
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Wikipedia